The country’s largest police force is developing tactics to predict future crimes in order to catch thieves before they’ve had the chance to commit robberies, it has been revealed.

Think along the lines of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, the Sunday Times said, which features a police department that catches and charges criminals with their crimes before they’ve committed them.

In the Hollywood blockbuster this is possible due to psychics called ‘precogs’ which have precognitive abilities and can stop murders or burglaries before they actually happen.

In reality, however, things won’t be as supernatural, the Metropolitan police will instead create a sophisticated algorithm which pools statistical analysis, crime patterns, and even the habits of wild animals, to determine where crime could happen and when.

The ‘future burglaries’ system, as it is called, will use ‘future crime’ maps that have a typical radius of a maximum of 250 yards of any given area.

‘Predictive policing places officers in the right place at the right time using the most up-to-date information,’ commander Simon Letchford, the head of the ‘future burglaries’ initiative, told the Sunday Times.

‘We produce daily maps based on the most recent recorded crime information.’ The scheme has been already been tested and is said to have showed a great deal of initial success, with the maps roughly ‘seven time more accurate than chance’.

In Medway, Kent, street violence fell by six per cent when the predictive policing was used, while in Trafford, Greater Manchester, burglaries fell by 26 per cent in one year.